Consider traditional dust control in the urban setting, regardless of pavement, with brooms adorning nearby routes of travel.
Category: urban views
back to transportation basics, illustrated
Wheels and the human body go places in ways we have often forgotten. Innovative, human-propelled transport, often with goods attached, knows no bounds.
Courtesy of photographs assembled first-hand last week, the proof is in, accompanied by the health benefits championed by urbanists today.
Want to leave the car behind?
Here are several visual hints for upcoming trips to and from your neighborhood hardware store, market, farm stand or beverage purveyor.
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in the city, we cannot live by social science alone
On March 8, Professor Edward Glaeser, a currently popular author on the subject of cities, applied his template for success to Seattle in a New York Times blog piece. He found our city to exemplify an ideal urban model, a former one-industry wonder now both economically varied and culturally cerebral.
According to Glaeser, we avoided Detroit on Puget Sound–with brains, a diverse, innovative economy, building height and the reach and influence of the University of Washington.
Glaeser’s piece is great press—the stuff of boosterism and for use as evidence in corner of higher education, in the face of looming budget cuts in Olympia.
But the essay lacks the essence of Seattle from the street, the qualitative sense of the city’s success from the look and feel of direct and knowing experience. It only hints at the personal interaction and bond with where we have chosen to live, or are destined to stay.
So, to offset the glory of Microsoft and Starbucks, Amazon and Nordstrom, apocryphal metrics and Glaeser’s convenient reference to fewer tall buildings than you might think, I decided to return to first principles and capture the authentic bustle of a March day.
The photograph above purposely compresses Seattle’s intensity, with the zoom lens illusion that three blocks are one, and that West Seattle is a hill above the downtown waterfront. Why? Because a populist article without an anchored essence is incomplete and calls for so much more than the notion that “smart people” come to a place and create a marketplace of wonders.
I have watched the city change since I was aware of cities, and wanted to imply change based on my own abstract dialogue with the local urban experience.
On this theme of relationship with built surroundings, I also reached out to a talented friend, a teacher and former lawyer-turned writer in New York City, Annie Q. Syed, and asked for her best “prose of place”. She did not disappoint, and suggested her remarkable rejoinder to the classic E.B. White essay about New York City.
Simply entitled NYC, Syed begins with the compelling “New York City is an impractical, yet awe-inspiring, relationship you cannot quit”.
Syed’s one sentence, the rest of her always integral, personal words, and a photo-based urban walk at rush hour reminds me once again: In the city, we cannot live by social science alone.
the soul never thinks without a picture of a city
Aristotle said that a soul never thinks without a picture.
He must have meant a picture of a city, because, in humanistic response to today’s pragmatic world of policy, regulation and urbanist proclamations, I often remember an August 12, 2006 photograph taken with a Nikon D-200 traded away long ago.
The camera is gone, but the image of Spinola Bay, St. Julian’s, Malta lives on, even as filtered and set to music here last July.
The reason is simple. The photograph suggests straightforward and ideal balances as follows:
- A balance of color, of dark and light;
- A balance of people, of land, water and sky;
- A balance of automobile, boat and pedestrian commingling and observing;
- A balance of residence, employment and compactness that seems not only to work, but to extol like a poster the virtues of urban life;
- And, finally, a balance that much of today’s contemporary urban examination and discussions prescribe anew.
In a portrait of a former small fishing village, and now a literal reflection of dwellings, shops and restaurants in an island country, there is buried not only a treatise, but a novel and a fantastical place to dream.
anomalies of urbanism, new city edition
In recently incorporated cities without a history of purposeful zoning, mixed-use urbanism can be more anomalous than in other urban settings.
Here, on the same street, kitch and handcuffs are but a block away.
